The Invisible Emperor

by Mark Braude

  Not long after Maxwell and Scott left Elba, Campbell sailed from Portoferraio as well for another trip along the Italian coast, ostensibly to compare information with other agents. He landed at Livorno on the last day of summer and went straight to Florence, where presumably the Contessa Miniaci was waiting.

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  THE POLITICS OF FORGETTING

  TO THE FRENCH, NAPOLEON was far away and out of sight, yet the man who replaced him was hardly more present. Louis XVIII spent many hours that summer in his bathtub, soaking in acrid eaux de Barèges to ease the pain of his arthritis and gout. Occasionally he listened to summaries of the more troubling reports from around the country. In one, from the northeastern town of Nancy, an agent wrote that people were speaking as though France had somehow betrayed Napoleon:

  It seems that his reverses and mistakes have served only to soften public judgments on him. His follies, his outbursts of temper and the ridiculous side of his behavior have only slightly undermined the blind confidence that the people and the soldiers have in his capacities. No one exactly conspires for him, but this stupid infatuation is itself a kind of conspiracy which must be a cause of concern since he can dream of profiting by it.

  The head of police, Beugnot, distributed a memo on the growing “tavern war against the administration.” Soldiers on inactive duty were seen gathered at cafés where they rehashed former glories and complained about how much livelier and better paying their days had been under Napoleon. Some even spoke about his return, or “resurrection,” as they worded it. Louis XVIII and his ministers knew better than to dismiss this kind of talk as idle chatter; French public opinion was shaped in the country’s roughly three hundred thousand drinking establishments as much as it was in its salons, newspapers, and pamphlets.

  Officials were also concerned by the “multitude of English who inundate Paris,” as one prefect wrote, “and whose obscure station occasions uneasiness as to their destination and intentions.” While financial markets had reacted favorably to the Bourbon restoration, prices for goods and services remained seductively low due to inflation, prompting many people to cross the newly reopened borders to reap the benefits. So many British visitors came to the capital in the first months after Napoleon’s surrender that the city’s Protestant church scheduled a regular Anglican service.

  Added to this influx of travelers were royalist émigrés, returning from the provinces and beyond, who tended to congregate in the tony Faubourg Saint-Germain, traditional den of the aristos and a key royalist beachhead in the city. Napoleon’s longtime rival Pozzo di Borgo disdainfully referred to these returned émigrés as “new” Parisians, despite their ancient names, and indeed many of them would have felt out of time and place after so long away. The émigrés were so quick to “watch, judge and tear each other to pieces,” wrote Pozzo di Borgo, that life in the Faubourg Saint-Germain was like being trapped in some sly play by Beaumarchais, where everyone “without a single exception is discontented.” Royalists back from exile (self-imposed or otherwise) hoped to reestablish age-old privileges, an objectionable sight to many French men and women.

  Exiled intellectuals returned as well, and their ways of seeing and thinking about France had also been reshaped by their time abroad. The Swiss-French philosopher and politician Benjamin Constant returned to Paris for the first time in more than a decade, after being expelled by Napoleon for expressing overly liberal views. Constant’s former mistress, the brilliant Madame de Staël, was back as well, still thinking of herself as “a stranger in her native land.” She wrote that her own absence from France was more painful than the exiled Napoleon would ever be able to understand, because she

  was born on the banks of the Seine, where his only claim to citizenship is tyranny. He saw the light of day on the island of Corsica, practically within Africa’s savage sway. . . . The air of this beautiful country is not his native air; how can he understand the pain of being exiled from it, he who considers this fertile land only as the instrument of his victories. Where is his patrie? It is any country that accepts his domination. His fellow-citizens? They are whatever slaves obey his orders.

  Louis XVIII and his ministers wanted to foster unity within the growing bureaucracy and so tried to find places not only for the returned émigrés and intellectuals, but also for people who had served under Napoleon. The official tasked with processing all the incoming requests for jobs and titles complained that he was working “like a wild beast,” keeping ungodly hours hunched over his desk in a tiny chamber above the king’s study at the Tuileries as he dealt with twice as many petitioners as there were available positions. “There is not one self-styled gentleman but thinks the King of France returned for his own particular benefit,” wrote one prefect. “They must have all their positions, pensions, and decorations.”

  Under pressure from his ministers, Louis “granted” the French people a Constitutional Charter, helping to usher in a period of relatively unprecedented freedom in the circulation of ideas, money, and people, though these gains were still largely circumscribed. The right to vote, for instance, applied to only one in 360 men. But while the charter had only officially been given to the French people by the grace of Louis XVIII, called back to France by “Divine Providence” after so long an absence, and in whose person all judicial, executive, and legislative authority nominally resided, it was still the most liberal European constitution of the era. The result was that the Bourbon restoration was the only major regime change in the nineteenth century not to require massive purges.

  People who supported the Bourbons did so for many reasons. There had been pockets of royalist resistance long before 1814, from the plotters who tried to assassinate Napoleon in 1800 to the hard-core Knights of the Faith, whose members had been trying to bring about a restoration for years and who had referred to their exiled sovereign as Louis le Désiré, Louis the Longed-For. Some royalists combined their monarchism with deep religiosity, while others had only wanted to see Napoleon replaced by anyone with a significant dynastic claim.

  Many people opposed the restoration outright, with their own complicated motives. Some were as opposed to a Bourbon monarchy as they had been to Napoleon’s empire and wanted to return to the revolutionary struggle. Others hoped to forge a middle way toward a new kind of liberalism within a monarchical framework. Others still pined for Napoleon. A few idealists saw this as the time to finally acknowledge the danger in following any ruler so slavishly as people had Napoleon. Benjamin Constant had voiced this sentiment in a pamphlet passed around Paris in the months preceding the abdication:

  While patriotism exists only by a vivid attachment to the interests, the ways of life, the customs of some locality, our so-called patriots have declared war on all of these. They have dried up this natural source of patriotism and have sought to replace it by a factitious passion for an abstract being, a general idea stripped of all that can engage the imagination and speak to the memory.

  Above all, French men and women wanted some kind of return to normalcy as they sought to make meaning out of the past years of carnage. Was Napoleon’s fall the end of the republican experiment? Proof that people weren’t ready to be trusted with democracy? Had the fall of Paris come as some kind of cosmic punishment for the excesses of the Revolution? The historian and statesman François Guizot, a young man at the time of the restoration, recalled that he’d never seen “such public inertia in the midst of so much national anxiety.” People without power grumbled even though they abstained from taking action, he wrote, while officials were eager to disavow Louis XVIII even while they served him without complaint. France was full “of exhausted spectators who had lost the ability to intervene in their own destiny, and who didn’t know which final act they should wish for or fear in this terrible drama in which they themselves were the stake being wagered.”

  What was clear was how much the French had learned over the past quarter century about political authority and the f
orms it could take. The republican experiment, though derailed, had shown that power didn’t have to emanate from a single man claiming divine right and could instead be created and enacted daily by the people themselves through their choice of dress, through the specific words they used, through the festivals they celebrated, through the songs they sang and the stories they told. The genie of revolution, that “Death-Birth of a World!,” as Thomas Carlyle called it, couldn’t be returned to its bottle. People had seen too much to become uniformly, unthinkingly, or permanently attached to any one person or single way of governance. “Nowadays,” wrote Chateaubriand, “a straggler in this life has witnessed the death, not only of men, but also of ideas: principles, customs, tastes, pleasures, sorrows, opinions, none of these resembles what he used to know.”

  From then on any French ruler would only be able to hold on to power by negotiating with the people in apparent good faith about how that power was to be deployed. And yet, as evidenced by Louis XVIII’s late brother, who sped his own demise just by publicly acknowledging that his subjects had minds and voices of their own, monarchy and compromise do not easily go hand in hand. As one historian has written, when the Bourbons returned, they faced “nothing less than the task of reclaiming their exclusive right to rule France, in a world where such a right no longer existed.”

  * * *

  • • •

  IN LATE AUGUST, Louis XVIII made his first public appearance since his coronation three months earlier, for the Feast of Saint-Louis, his name day. After a coach ride through some of the main boulevards he stood alongside his relatives on one of the Tuileries terraces to wave to the massive crowds. Just as they understood the political value in keeping the Bourbon court in Paris, among the people, rather than returning it to the traditional seat at Versailles, his advisers also understood that any display of royal grandeur must also include his brother the comte d’Artois as well as the comte’s sons, the duc d’Angoulême and the duc de Berry, and Marie-Thérèse, Madame Royale, last surviving child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

  The future of the Bourbon reign rested on the power of history, for without the authority of “the eternal yesterday,” as Max Weber worded it, no monarch could claim the right to govern. One of the stated goals of Louis’s charter, in renewing the peerage, was to “bind all memories with all hopes, in bringing together former and present times.” But while the Bourbons traded on a legitimacy gained through lineage, they simultaneously espoused the idea of oubli, obliviousness or disregard for the past. As the charter read, “All investigations of opinions and votes expressed before the Restoration are forbidden. The same disregard is demanded of both the courts and the citizenry.” A complicated kind of forgetting was required of the French people, who were encouraged to erase from their memories any horrors experienced prior to Louis XVIII even while the king himself reached back to before the Revolution to which he owed his current status (since only his brother’s execution had put him in line for the throne) to revive and capitalize on the symbology and rituals of the Old Regime.

  * * *

  • • •

  SOMETHING THAT PROVED EASY to disregard from the safety of the Tuileries was the payment promised to Napoleon on Elba. With the budget overly taxed, Louis XVIII and his ministers thought it contrary to the public interest to honor the terms of a treaty that would fund the livelihood of their enemy, at least for the time being.

  Meanwhile, a man who had not only survived but prospered through several regime changes over the past decades in France surveyed the current political scene with caution. He was Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s former minister of police, and he thought that Napoleon on Elba was like “Vesuvius next to Naples.” In a letter to Beugnot, the current head of police, he predicted the following spring would “bring Bonaparte back to us, with the swallows and the violets.”

  FALL

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  HE IS TOLERABLY HAPPY

  CAMPBELL RETURNED TO Portoferraio in early October. He wrote in his journal that he “had been assured from good authority that [Napoleon’s] funds are nearly exhausted,” which prompted “a great diminution in the expenses, but not in the extent, of his household and establishment.” The island’s salt marshes had failed and iron sales were slack due to an influx of old British guns into Genoa since the lifting of the wartime blockades. By Campbell’s rough calculations, Napoleon was likely to spend about twice as much as he would bring in as revenue from Elba’s natural resources. He learned that Bertrand was switching out the Mulini’s collection of imported wines for the rougher and cheaper local vintage.

  French agents also heard about Napoleon’s apparent economic woes. “So many people have been dismissed from his entourage,” read one report, “that he does almost everything for himself except go to market.” But many saw this as a positive, reasoning that dwindling funds would keep Napoleon from ever being able to raise a proper army.

  Napoleon, for his part, later claimed that money had never been a great concern for him on Elba. He calculated that the island should have brought him around half a million francs a year between the iron mines, the fisheries, other properties, taxes, and customs, and he figured his personal and administrative expenses at one hundred thousand francs. The annual surplus would have been more than enough for him, he said, especially if paired with the pension owed to him by the French government and the existing kitty that Peyrusse amassed before the exile.

  A true accounting of the financial situation on Elba likely lies somewhere between Campbell’s fretful predictions and Napoleon’s boastful claims made in hindsight. Napoleon had always paid careful attention to balancing his empire’s finances, but on Elba he spent relatively wildly and unsystematically, switching money from one account to another, recording purchases when he felt like it, and using vague headings without marking whether he was spending state income or his own capital. He economized where he could, but was far from miserly. When Drouot presented his military budget, for instance, Napoleon asked why he hadn’t included himself on the payroll, to which Drouot answered that room, board, a secretary, a servant, and a horse were enough for him. In the final budget Napoleon allotted an extra six thousand francs for Drouot nonetheless.

  * * *

  • • •

  THERE WERE A FEW DEVELOPMENTS to keep Campbell on alert that October. Elba was still at a standoff regarding back taxes, and many people, including the entire population of Capoliveri, had yet to pay anything at all. For now Napoleon refused to have his troops do much more than walk around menacingly. To Campbell it seemed that the Elbans, who had long before given up on loving Napoleon, now no longer even feared him. “Napoleon is never now saluted with cries of Vive l’Empereur!,” he wrote. He also heard that morale among the troops had taken a hit after a bout of venereal disease raged through the barracks. Napoleon imposed a fine for anyone who sought relief at the hospital for their ailments, which had insulted the soldiers, who thought the price of treatment should be covered by the treasury. Streetlights were installed at every ten meters in Portoferraio with the aim of curbing prostitution, and each member of the Guard was guaranteed an ounce of rice per day to “help ward off sickness.”

  Late in the month Campbell discovered that a Tunisian corsair had anchored off the coast and that its commander had barged into the customs house demanding a private audience with the “Great Lord of the Earth.” Cambronne denied his request and the man returned to his ship, which then saluted the Inconstant with five guns. Napoleon’s ship returned the salute and the two crews later exchanged gifts. Campbell wondered if Napoleon had planned this spectacle in advance. While the dey of Algiers had publicly threatened Elba, the Tunisians hadn’t declared themselves one way or the other, and Campbell thought Napoleon might have arranged some kind of pact with them. He later recorded his amazement at seeing this same Tunisian corsair giving chase to some ships near Piombino, writing, “It appears certain that Napoleon has established himself
on an amicable footing with this Power or that he has bribed the captain of this ship with the advantage of taking shelter in his ports, to be able perhaps to communicate with France.”

  He meanwhile discovered that Napoleon had taken a trip “with some ladies and several others belonging to his household” to Pianosa, ostensibly for a luncheon. Campbell thought the neighboring island might be serving as a rendezvous point for “receiving persons from the Continent, and particularly Naples and Corsica, without any possible means of detecting it.” He wrote to Castlereagh about his theory, though his journal doesn’t mention any response from the foreign secretary on the matter.

  He’d also noticed how Bertrand was trying “by little hints” to deduce when he next planned to leave and for how long. Bertrand had remarked casually on how frequently Campbell seemed to be traveling lately. “I can’t say whether this was in order to ascertain the footing upon which my stay was prolonged,” wrote Campbell, “or merely in the way of accidental observation from my making frequent excursions to the mainland, without any other meaning.” He figured that since Bertrand and Napoleon had always received him so kindly, if less frequently than they once had, there was no danger in telling Bertrand plainly that Castlereagh had directed him to remain in residence on Elba at least until the closing of the Congress of Vienna and that after that date, whenever it came, he “presumed that His Majesty’s Government would enable me to exhibit the powers of a permanent and ostensible employment.”

  Napoleon summoned Campbell for an interview. Their talk turned to France, where according to Napoleon there was now “universal disgust” with the Bourbons. Louis XVIII had made a bad tactical error by recognizing the Duke of Wellington as ambassador a few weeks earlier, he said. It was an insult to grant an ambassadorship to the same man who had devoted so much energy to destroying France. Campbell wrote that Napoleon predicted “a violent reaction of the whole nation before five years were over.” The French, he said, were “martial beyond any other nation, by nature as well as in consequence of the Revolution and their ideas of glory,” and that the French spirit, “once roused, cannot be opposed. It’s like a torrent.” He next spoke favorably about the Italians, “quick and proud,” and good fighters. He told Campbell that “all the young men were attached to the French, from having served with them in the army, and their minds were bent upon the formation of Italy into a kingdom.”